Roughly 12,000 Jackson residents are currently dealing with low or no water pressure following a series of broken pipes and high usage during the cold, JXN Water announced Thursday morning. Still, there are no plans to shut off water citywide despite a raft of misinformation that spread across social media Wednesday amid a deep cold snap.
Residents in zip codes 39209, 39204, 39212, 39272 and 39170 are now under a precautionary boil water notice. Residents in these areas, mostly located in West Jackson along Highway 49 and South Jackson, should allow water to boil vigorously for at least one minute before consuming it.
In a morning press avail, Ted Henifin, the federal manager for the Jackson water system, stated that “it’s gonna take hours, potentially a day or so before we’re able to (restore pressure to affected areas).” Henifin also asked the entire city to conserve water where possible.
Additionally, JXN Water has asked residents to only use the JXN Water call center number (601-500-5200) to report active water leaks. Repairing the leaks from broken pipes is necessary to stabilize the system pressure.
JXN Water spokesperson Ameerah Palacios dispelled rumors about a citywide shutdown of the water system in a press statement late Wednesday night.
“JXN Water plants are operating to provide Water for All. All the Time. That has not changed. We are not shutting the plants down tonight and we haven’t shut any water off. There are no widespread issues,” Palacios said.
Residents reported Wednesday that the panic usage as people fill tubs with water in anticipation of a shutoff has already resulted in pressure issues in some parts of Jackson—especially in the south and west sections of the city furthest from the water plants. Those issues should abate once the misinformation-fueled panic does.
Across Facebook, posts warning that “water will be shut off tonight” spread rapidly on Wednesday with no sourcing. One reader noted that the misinformation may have begun after Jackson, Ky.—a tiny municipality of around 2,000 in the Bluegrass State’s Breathitt County—announced earlier Wednesday that it would have to shut its water off for six to eight hours to perform repairs.
In Jackson, Miss., both the O.B. Curtis and J.H. Fewell water treatment plants are producing roughly 60 million gallons of water a day to address the intense added usage of the cold water, with many residents dripping their faucets and filling their tubs in case of an outage.
Additionally, although JXN Water reports immense progress on the water plants that were the most immediate cause of the weekslong outages in 2021 and 2023, Jackson’s beleaguered distribution system remains the foremost challenge for maintaining consistent water pressure across the city.
“Deliberate misinformation is being spread tonight to try to increase demand in the system and create pressure issues that impact your water service,” Palacios warned tonight.
At a Friday press event, Ted Henifin, the federal receiver in charge of Jackson’s water system, acknowledged that although much work had been done to winterize the plants and stabilize the system, persistent, serious water loss issues continually complicated the city’s water pressure needs.
“We’ve got 14 crews standing by to isolate and fix the lines that break,” he said, adding that crews were scheduled to work overnight to avoid gaps in repair. In late 2022, when a hard freeze again damaged the system’s functionality, only two full crews were available for repairs, with a half crew working alongside them.
Henifin told this reporter at that press event that Jackson can produce up to 60 million gallons of water a day between both plants, an amount that the city continues to produce through the winter weather.
Jackson should not require this amount of water, even in high-stress circumstances like a deep freeze. But despite the city fixing many serious leaks, Henifin said the demands were failing to decrease.
“We still are looking for (leaks) and we find them and yet we’re not seeing the result in a decreased demand. We’re not sure if more is going out to the existing leaks that we haven’t found,” he admitted.
Now, as the system strains under the cold, Jackson faces two challenges: decayed infrastructure and the fragile, fleeting trust of residents.
